Days went by and the doctors’ tests were inconclusive. Her father’s gastrointestinal tract was shutting down. Her mother was cleaning leaves from the gutters. Sprawled against the Virginia sky at the top of her ladder, a seventy-year-old scarecrow waiting to beat back god’s angels.

All Edith and Val could do was drive. There was a circuit of roads called the Loop, backcountry with no speed limit. A place where teens in cluttered hatchbacks raced, parked, hotboxed, and groped.

I wish I had a fucking cigarette, Edith said.

Trans girls aren’t supposed to smoke.

No one is supposed to smoke.

Edith was comfortable behind the wheel of Valerie’s car. It swung into the gravel shoulder as she turned onto the next road in the Loop. The air was cool with A/C and Orbit gum.

What if he dies and I never come out to him.

He’s not going to die.

It’s so weird talking to them without talking about this. Like I have nothing to say because my brain, a whole hundred percent of the time, is trying to work out gender stuff.

Is it weird being back here? As a girl, that is.

Am I a girl, Val? I feel like a stupid boy who spends an hour a day shaving his chest in the shower.

Oh shut up.

Is it weird? I have no idea. It makes everything feel less possible. In lieu of a cigarette, she chewed more gum. She was amassing quite a wad. I mean how does anyone do this. You’re carrying around a whole history inside you, and there are a million people who know you, and—what are you supposed to do, just cut out the whole first quarter century of your life?

You mean like I did.

Yes. I mean—no, Valerie—­

Edith you have no idea—­

How lucky I am? Yeah, yeah. She bit a hangnail until blood showed. Your parents are fucking creeps, horrible people, whatever. No matter how much of her past they discussed, Valerie’s parents were always shadow-players. Banished before the curtain rose.

Val squeezed the handle above the door. Actually, I was going to say, how little this matters.

Oh, are you going to go in at me about ““chosen family”” or whatever?

It’s not about family at all. It’s about the people you keep. What you do for them and what they do for you. Edith tried not to look at her as Valerie said, You were always upset with me for leaving, but you know, I didn’t have to come back.

Yes, sorry, you deserve a medal for that.

Don’t you wonder why I never keep in touch with people from home? Valerie never called Texas “home.” The kinds of fuck-ups I was friends with, there were kids called Knuckles or Candy or Nut. No one really cared if you asked to be called Val. If you wore a skirt and called yourself a girl.

But that’s not enough, Valerie went on. Sometimes you leave a place and there’s nothing pulling you back. Some days, who you were will be too much. It doesn’t matter when you transition. It’s fucking impossible to be a person without giving up certain parts of the past.

I love you, is the thing. Even when you act like a fucking asshole, I love you. And if you never have a real relationship with your parents, whatever. They’re no realer than the people you or I went to high school with. I’m real. Adam’s real. Fuck it, Tessa too. Give up on the rest. I love you, Edie. There was only the road, the steering wheel in her hands, the voice in her ear. And Edith said nothing. I love you. Edith said nothing.